Fixing Broken MSP Marketing (EP 1010)

[0:12] Welcome to the IT Business Podcast, the go-to show for IT professionals and

[0:17] managed service providers who want to run their business better, smarter, and faster. Each week, Uncle Marv brings you real-world insights, proven strategies, and stories from industry experts, vendors, and fellow MSPs, all designed to help you stay ahead of the curve and thrive in today's tech landscape. So plug in, power up, and let's dive into another episode of the IT Business Podcast with your host, Uncle Marv.

[0:53] Hello, friends. Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. I'm back. Minnesota did not keep me. It was a little chilly, but glad to be back here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in Studio B here, and we've got a great show lined up for you tonight. I can already see. Shout out to my good boy, Eric Anthony up there. And Eric, thank you for doing a shout out before this show. Eric did his show live this evening, just before here, and he did a little preview for me. I appreciate that. He had on Cal and Sapien. It's pitch it season, folks. So all those episodes are going to be coming out. I will start recording mine soon, but they won't be out until later this summer because it is the summer of podcasting. So I It just came back from ACES last week, the Apple Consultant Conference up there in Minnesota. I'm releasing those now. You've already heard a couple of those. A few more will be coming out. We've got this series that we're doing, Money, Marketing, and Growth, during May, June.

[2:09] The first week in June i will be in salt lake city attending packs eight beyond that should be interesting i gotta see if i can get in touch with my boy rob ray the godfather of the channel see we can do our annual preview show now i just got the email for the podcasting row which is set up so my schedule will be out to people that want to get interviewed there uh it's gotta be crazy folks new city uh haven't been there before don't know what it's going to be like but it should be.

[2:44] Fantastic but let me tell you this uh two conferences that could not be any different are aces conference for the apple consultants that i was at last week two days of just straight business talk uh no tech well there was tech but it was in the hallway so it was kind of off to the side but from the stage it was all about running your business and it was literally the same types of conversations that we have as service providers on the Microsoft side as they were having you know what to do about employees how to grow pricing uh mindset of a business owner all the same thing so it was a very good conference uh one that i think you might want to consider going to if it's local to you and you want to know about running a business, not a bad conference to go to. A little smaller. Think UnConvention. Think tech con in terms of size. But it was something where you actually got to sit and hang out not only with the fellow business owners that were there, but the people that were speaking were there both days, even the keynote speaker. So it was a fantastic event. Now, Facts 8, of course, those are great event, lots of people, thousands and thousands of people, a nice little after party. No, I don't know who will be there, but it should be good. It should be interesting. Now.

[4:12] I mentioned that i will be at pax 8. what i do also want to mention because it is going to be here before you know it Techcon Unplugged is back when i say back it is back in the original sense that we know it is back to a two-day conference not this crisscross across the country thing um, it is going to be two days, everybody in one place.

[4:41] That's about all I can say right now. I know that there is stuff going on. I've been in talks with Paco. So I, I, I have some stuff, but I don't want to jinx anything, uh, because I think he's still working some things out. I can tell you it is in September, uh, the 17th and 18th or the 18th and 19th, whatever that weekend is. It is going to be in Chicago. So it's going to be an easy place for people to get to. You will see a lot of the same stuff that we've done before, as well as some new things. So it is going to be a fantastic event, a small, intimate conference, and back to the way we know it. So TechCon Unplugged, I will tell you more later as I get them. Here's what else is happening this summer. I told you that we're going to be doing the Pitch-It interviews. Once I finish PAX 8, I will be doing those interviews. So all of June will be PAX 8. And a continuation i actually have a surprise because uh we could not fit all of the money marketing and growth into may it's going to spill over into June uh i will have the Pax8 interviews coming out throughout the month of June July will be the pitch it interviews so if you are a part of the ConnectWise family and are used to the pitch it conferences uh the pitch competition.

[6:02] I will be interviewing all of the participants I believe there are 22 this year, And there has been a change in the prize structure. You will be surprised. Now, originally I thought that when they did that, they were going to take away the steak knives, but oh no, the steak knives have been asked to repeat bigger and better. I'm working on the details. We will tell you that soon. So that will be July, August. I can already tell you it's going to be all about MSPs, making a whole series on specific MSP topics in August. September will be, I don't know, of course, we'll be talking TechCon. I'm also going to show it to, I brought it here just so I could show you. If you're watching the video, I'm holding my hand, the Fluke Link Duo podcast.

[6:59] No, I said that wrong. It is the Flute Link IQ Duo. It is the network cable tester, Wi-Fi tester that we've talked about in the past. I'm going to be using this this weekend, and I'll be able to give you a full review on it and tell you what I like about it, what I don't like about it compared to the other stuff I'm using. I'm also going to be taking out this bad boy. And for those of you listening by audio, I'm holding up in my hand the Trend Network's Signal Tech QT. It is also a network cable tester, and we're going to test these out this weekend, and I'll give you my feedback on that.

[7:45] Now, I do have a question. So I spent the last week putting out a bunch of job quotes.

[7:55] I'm working with somebody to do a server quote for four Hyper-V machines all in a single box and we're quoting them two ways we're quoting them with one of the big bad boy Synology appliances i believe it's the sa3610 we're maxing out the ram on that we're doing a tons of storage they wanted 50 terabytes worth of storage and the vms so we did a quote there and then i put out quotes for a super micro machine because when i started to quote the hp system who cost more than my car so uh did a couple of quotes on super micro uh ranging from about 28 to 36 grand that should be interesting in there but the reason i say all that is those are the types of quotes that I m putting out I m going to be updating a couple of firewalls and.

[9:00] Let me just check and see. I don't know if Corey from SonicWall is in the chat tonight. Corey, if you are, look away. Look away, cover your ears, do something, because I might be replacing a SonicWall with a Ubiquity Beast. You heard that correctly, the Ubiquity Beast. Now, I've seen a bunch of comments out in the forums about it. I've seen people simply commenting about, you know, how much it costs. Oh my goodness, it's $1,500. But here's the thing.

[9:40] The sonic walls that i put in are five grand plus and they have all of the security features and stuff so in this particular case this is not one of my law firms so i have I m sticking with what i said my law firms will stay sonic wall but for my smaller clients this is a not-for-profit um.

[10:02] Price is a sensitive subject for them so I m looking at putting in this dream machine beast uh and once you add on the five-year uh UI care and the cyber secure uh which is their version of protection um it's 1900 bucks so half the price of what i would normally quote for the sonic wall but all of the features in terms of running you know the firewall with multi-gig WAN connections but being able to support cameras.

[10:41] Wi-Fi access points. We're talking this place has about 28 cameras that I'm looking to take over from their camera vendor that none of us like. I'm actually, I've got, let's see, seven access points. Thinking of trying to roll those over into the Ubiquiti family and they have a door access system. So I'm trying to see if those little door plates, the little magnet things will work with the Ubiquiti system so I can go in and basically take all of the networks. So that's what I'm working on. But I don't know of anybody that's actually purchased the Beast and used it. So I'm putting the message out there. I thought about doing it today on the Facebook group and I just got busy. I was doing another super micro quote. so I didn't put that out there so I'm going to put that out there tonight Ubiquity Beast I installed a UCG Fiber.

[11:44] Two three weekends ago and it's running perfectly i have that here in my office testing it uh pretty nice pretty nice um but I ll put in my putting my sonic wall back, in another week because I ll take that to a client so uh that's where I m at so uh and folks don't just indulge me and tell me like two months from now uh if you know of somebody that is using the ubiquity beast i know it's only been out a month or so but if anybody has got it if anybody somebody's tested it, if anybody's played with it, let me know. I need to hear about it because the firewall for this not-for-profit needs to be replaced by August. So I need to make a decision pretty quick here. All right, let us move along here because our guest tonight made a promise that I'm going to see if he's going to keep it.

[12:38] But before he does, let me just go ahead and get a couple of things out of the way here.

[12:46] You to do and let's talk about tonight's uh presenting sponsor of the live show uh threat locker so you know in this business we spend a lot of time chasing threats catching blocking, responding well what if your security just stopped the bad stuff before it ever ran That's exactly what ThreatLocker does. It's zero-trust endpoint security built specifically for MSPs. Allow listing, ring fencing, network access control, MDR, the whole stack, one platform. And their CyberHero team has your back 24-7. So stop playing defense. Lock your clients down before something goes sideways. Click the sponsor link in the show notes or visit ThreatLocker using the link on the IT Business Podcast website and tell them Uncle Marv sent you and while you're there check out the other sponsors that we have TruGrid is there OneStream is there as well as others thank you very much for supporting the show, we appreciate it, okay now.

[14:06] Let me see. How do I want to explain this? Our guests today, normally when I put out a pre-show clip talking about the show, I kind of say what we're talking about. I introduce the guests. But this person out pretty much outright, uh, made a comment that I thought, you know what, if there's anybody that's going to do it, it's probably going to be me. Um, so just to tell you what we're going to talk to you about tonight is something that a lot of us are quietly wrestling with.

[14:48] We're good at the tech you take care of the clients but the growth just isn't matching the effort, leads are lumpy sales feels random and marketing you know i have no marketing Marv but it's mostly word of mouth and hope so my guest today Dave Scott lives right in the middle of that problem Dave is a fractional CMO and CRO who works with MSPs and B2Bs that have hit the growth ceiling and are tired of throwing money at the tactics that don't move the needle. He comes in, lines up your sales and marketing, and helps you build an actual growth engine instead of a collection of one-off campaigns. Now tonight he made a comment about if you get triggered um stop doing that so uh.

[15:48] And thank you for that warm extra kind introduction my friend it's good to see you I m grateful to be here well thanks for coming on the show my man yeah this is awesome I m so excited i can told you in the green room i feel like a rapper on stage I m just getting ready to riff and we're just going to rip the band-aid off Marv we're going to talk all right well let's rip it off by asking this question I m going to change my game here and we're going to start off and see if anybody gets triggered so here's the question I m going to ask you i don't know if you're ready for it but here it is let's go what are some of.

[16:24] The worst marketing advice that you are hearing MSPs get right now oh my gosh that list is long okay um I m going to see if you'd say it yeah so a couple of them is like using ai with like phony voiceovers on the videos right you've seen those ever seen those right you mean like my intro is that what you're saying no not at all what was your video your intro wasn't that was it was it a video created with ai and some fake voice well the video wasn't ai but the voice yes i would say like 50 50 shot i wouldn't say i wouldn't recommend it well like if that's your whole social media content strategy like guys like Paul green will tell you or tech tribe will tell you super bad don't do that because people notice it and I m not thinking like the audience of an MSP or Saas or a bar vendor like they're not looking for Hollywood style content right but they also don't want stuff that's shitty that's created in a crackerjack box or a vacuum you know what i mean so like be creative like put some creativity into it put some effort into it make it excellent make sure the captions don't have friggin you know punctuation misspellings or uh you know they forgot the oxford comma which they shouldn't have and so stuff like that you know use the m dash a loss yes which you know comes from Claude or ChatGPT right yeah the m dash So that's the first one. So create authentic content.

[17:54] Don't create stuff that's syndicated. I hate, hate, hate syndicated content.

[18:00] It's the stuff you get from Robin Robbins and Kaseya now, the Producers Club, which is bad. It's stuff you get from Tech Tribe, which is bad. You pay like $100 or $50 or $200 a month or whatever, and you can just pick a laundry list of content.

[18:13] It's not authentic it's not creative it's not organic it's not original stuff like your competitors using so don't do that like try to come up with a content creation plan that is meaningful and excellent right and use good graphic design don't use you know ChatGPT to design every single piece of art for you although it's gotten a lot improved that's for sure yeah so there's a couple of them a day but let me let me stop you there I ll let you finish but i need to stop you because so I read a stat today. And I know that this stat isn't universal, but the people that are engaged in a lot of the things that I see in the groups that I run with, I saw a stat that 77% of MSPs are less than a million in sales. Yeah.

[19:11] And a one to two person shop is less than 500 and three to five is probably the bulk of the MSPs in our space that are less than a million a lot of small guys a lot of small guys and they it has been said that these shops can't afford real marketing like you're talking about So all of these, all of these platforms that are giving us stuff for, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month, it's, it's, it's stuff that we can afford. Totally. I totally hear you. And so that makes total sense. And so let me just say for a second, we're like, we're all friends here. No judgment.

[19:57] Like I've had to do stuff on my own. Every MSP owners had to do stuff on their own. Like we're all friends here. And there's a lot of empathy that goes into everything I say tonight. Right. like a very much like a Ted Lasso. Like, I don't want to shake my finger at you, but you know, sometimes a bully needs to be punched in the teeth too. You know what I mean? And sometimes we need a good swift kick in the pants and we need to be told, no, this is a bad idea. Um, I heard the comment one time from a, not a competitor of mine, but somebody in our space. And she once said, doing something is better than nothing. And that's not true at all. Doing something is not better than nothing. It's still, if it's wrong. Right. And so for the small guys, um, you know, there's this really great book. And I think I've said it on your show before called the entrepreneurial equation by Carol Roth. Carol Roth is a conservative. She's a Fox news contributor. She's smart and beautiful and amazing and just really successful. And in the book, she talks about two types of business owners. You've got your entrepreneur and your business owner who actually grows something.

[20:56] Entrepreneur has got a lot of freaking ideas, right? He's visionary. He's all over the place. He's not taking his Adderall for his ADHD meds and he's not doing all the things, right? So that guy is like that guy's a little bit cray cray. Nobody wants to work with them. And then you've got a business owner who once started as an entrepreneur, but then he started his business and his company and his firm because he truly felt like he could make somebody's life better and he could improve based on what his competitors are doing today in the marketplace. And he could make somebody's life exponentially better and exponentially improved. You don't want to stay stuck in the entrepreneur the lifestyle model for too long because you'll get out beat by your competitors and growing a business like the business owner the second type of entrepreneurial equation is really really hard because you have to be good at finances and growth and you have to learn how to manage ARR if you're a SaaS firm and MRR if you're a MSP and you got to manage cash flow and employees and vendors and by the way I m disappointed you're turning it back on sonic wall i won't tell them that um i didn't say i was turning my back on i just said i know I m just harassing you know what i mean though but it's like more about it's more about um it's less about hardware and tech stack and it's and it's more about managing a business being a good business guy right and so um I ve had a bunch of home improvement projects lately my girlfriend and i are doing some renovations at her house and.

[22:18] We constantly lament about how bad contractors are to communicate with you and stay organized and get you a proposal and get you a quote and show up on time. And then once they do, the communication is intermittent and it's like, oh my God, they're really good at this. They're awesome. They're awesome at their job.

[22:36] IT engineers be IT engineers be IT engineers. They're great at their craft. They're great problem solvers. they may shame you at 4 30 on a Friday afternoon if outlook or Microsoft your Microsoft incense goes down but you know that they got your back right and they're going to fix the problem because that's what they're there for and they're awesome and so a lot of empathy you know a lot of compassion in my tone tonight but you know Gary v was the uh keynote speaker at Datto con i think back in 2021 or 2022 back when you know your excellence rob ray was still there i think and um Gary did a great job and he came out swinging right from the get-go and he said this is a professional services audience you guys own it companies 80 over 80 percent of you guys shouldn't even be in business today you're in business for the wrong reasons your nervous systems are on fire you're destroying your marriages you might be on your second third or fourth marriage you know god forbid you're snapping at your kids you're stressed out you got to go through layoffs most of you guys shouldn't be in business today.

[23:39] But for the ones who are and who are serious about growth, here's what you got to do. And then he went on to give us keynote. And I've had like probably close to 100 conversations since December, December through now. So about six months  worth. And the reason we've had so many conversations is we started the Answer Engine Playbook, which is a daily Substack newsletter. Sends out an article every day about AI. Every day. It's always about AI. And it might be about how AI is transforming prompts, your sales marketing. It's about utility costs and data centers, like covers the full gamut. Right. And so we've gotten just like hundreds and hundreds of leads through this. And what I'll tell you, Marr, beyond a shadow of a doubt is the majority of those conversations, we're not a good fit for them and they're not a good fit for us.

[24:23] And the majority of those business owners are really sick. They're sick. They're sick mentally, they're sick emotionally, and they're sick physically. They're not taking care of themselves. They're struggling to be good business guys. Again, they're that contractor. It's hard to keep track of. Your sheetrock guy or your steel guy, your framing guy, woodworking guy, whatever. They're really great.

[24:42] And God love them for that. But you ask them to run a business and they just fall apart because they don't know what they're doing. They're not naturally good business guys. Most IT guys fall into that same category. And again we're all friends here I m not trying to shake my finger to anybody so if you got an ego and you get upset well then that's your fault and you're getting defensive and it just proves my point that you have an ego but if you're not and you can listen to the voice of reason a little bit i would encourage the men and women who are on this call tonight like if you're that profile and your business is sick which means you're sick because the business changes the culture just like the owner does it follows the you know very much in line with the owner's character and core attributes then you know really think about if it's something you want to continue doing because the it space is shrinking and it's shrinking fast that's why the 20 groups is blown up that's why reed warren it valuations mike Harvath at revenue rocket Gary pika and his team like they're all so overwhelmed Marv with M&A deals and mergers from two three four five firms into one or two like it's crazy they're so insanely busy well they cannot keep up yeah there's a lot that's changing the landscape yeah and you mentioned AI is certainly changing the landscape yeah I know that you know we've talked even before AI our customers are getting smarter they are our customers know the tech yeah um I also.

[26:10] I want to throw a couple of vendors on the bus because you know we're fighting the clients and we're fighting the vendors because the vendors are going after our clients so you know the customer you know they see transparent pricing and they're like well you know why should we go with you when we can go here yeah we'll call our Revo rep and they'll get us this hardware for our access control system instead of the MSP and I m like what are you guys doing you're cutting out You're cutting your nose to spite your face. And that's happening a lot. It's happening a ton. Because, listen, private equity doesn't care. No. They don't care. It's all the matter, the bottom line. Yeah. So, yeah, so there's a lot of stuff. And the smaller MSPs, the solo techs. Yeah. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not scared.

[26:58] But I know a lot who are. Yeah. You're also a veteran. You've been doing it for, what, 30 years? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you weathered all the worst storms probably already.

[27:07] So there is this thing where some companies are saying, okay, you know what, I got to buckle down. I may not have tried to grow for the last five, ten years. I need to do something. But they've been so used to doing it DIY or on the cheap. So how do they recognize when it's time to stop the DIY marketing and bring in that real leadership? Yeah. So what I would tell them at that $1 million mark, and I had this conversation with a client of ours about a couple months ago who's a new client of ours, and they said, hey, at what point do we get so big as we have to change some of our staff? And I said, well, you can't do the same things that get you to 5 mil to get you to 10 mil to get you to 1 mil to get you to 3 mil. And they're like, yeah, we get it. We might need to change some team members around, hire and fire a bunch, move people around, rolls and seats, and we get that. What my advice would be, if you are sub $1 million in annual revenue, leverage AI, leverage the crap out of AI, leverage it to create a content calendar for you, do the simple things, tell it to create a brand guide. I'm going to give your audience some resources tonight for free.

[28:22] There's a tool that we call the Brand Script. Basically, it's just mission and vision. What's your unique selling proposition? Your three of them that they talk about in EOS and the Rockefeller Habits.

[28:34] How do you come up with a unique brand positioning statement, which is like your promise? What are you offering to potential clients? It doesn't matter what sort of vertical that your SaaS or your MSP is serving, like it's for any vertical. And it's just a couple other things and in your tagline which is the most powerful copy on your website right so we're going to give you a template we can't fill it out for everybody because we don't understand all your audiences businesses but it's going to be a template they can fill out and if they have questions they can reach out to us we'll provide you with all the stuff so it's free, but i would tell them do the simple things like that like take this template apply it upload it to Claude ChatGPT to give them your URL say learn me memorize me learn my tone of voice ask me a series of prompts to understand my business and then fill out this template that Marvin b and Dave Scott gave me on the show and boom away you go and then update your copy from there now you're going to have to find some time to do it but you know you can go to like onlinejobs.ph we get our vas from there they're awesome and they're cheap anywhere from five to fifteen bucks an hour depending right and they're loyal and they do good work yeah there's a bit of a time difference yeah you got to learn how to manage them and that's a whole nother thing too but with a little bit of elbow grease and a little bit of sunshine like you should be able to teach them about your business and they can update your website or build you one for you know relatively cheap I m talking like, 500 to a thousand bucks maybe a couple thousand bucks at the very most.

[30:00] So you're talking about DIY, if you're under a million dollars, don't even worry about that. Just do the basics, get a website, fill out your branding, you know, meaning like, what's your identity? Who are you? What are you about? What do you stand for? And then you get to that million dollar mark, you know, it's a hundred grand plus of recurring revenue every single month, MRR. Then you can talk about hiring a marketing firm. Then you can talk about hiring me or somebody else or, you know, whoever, just pick your poison and then away you go. But unless you're over that million dollar hump, your goal should be to secure as many managed services contracts as you can get away from break fix, fire your shitty customers. Don't worry about hardware and software. Get a tech stack, get a productized, focus on SVP specialization, verticalization, productization, which Vern Harnish and Paul Dippel and Gary pika and you know all the godfathers focus on and talk about and i talk about it too.

[30:57] And um so focus on those things first SVP get your identity figured out get the bare bones basics of your sales and marketing materials and your website built and your copy built use our template and then you know sell your pants off um or sell your socks off as much as you can and your pants off too right so you get two million bucks once you get two million bucks then you probably got some leeway and some latitude unless you're just spending money like a fool which, you know, happens from time to time. Well, I was going to say, because a lot of what you said, you know, sounds feasible. And I'll be honest with you, a lot of marketing people say, we'll do this for you. We'll, you know, we'll sit with you. We'll help you, you know, identify those things. Yeah. But a lot of people...

[31:40] And I m going to I m going to not speak from experience so I m speaking from what people have told me that are bigger than i am yeah they are let's just say they're.

[31:52] At a million 1.5 and they are spending the money on marketing and they're just they're like it's just not working so i know that that's not your target area but what's it take to get these people, from real marketing so they can get to that next level i mean it is but it isn't like we have one of our clients that we um just stopped working with recently in la Los Angeles they were about, seven or eight hundred k and we got them to 1.6 mil last year and it was i mean it took us a couple years to get there but and they were profitable they had like 20 profitability it was awesome um so you know we got them there so I m willing to work with smaller vendors, Let's take a step back for a second. You have to, it's about your mindset. And I saw Tim Golden's question. Hey, Tim. Dude, I haven't talked to Tim for forever. Tim's awesome. I love Tim. The question was kind of a little...

[32:51] That really wasn't a question. Yeah, yeah. Got it. I said something about marketing automation. We'll get there. Oh, yeah. That was the comment he made later. Yeah. So sell your socks off till you get to a certain point. You get to one mil or about there, and it's about investment. It's about where you want to go. Like if you're 55 or 60 years old, you shouldn't be investing another half million dollars or 100 grand or 200 grand or 300 grand in anything. Like you should be getting profitable. you should be utilizing valuation as a service which is it valuations or MSP CFO they have a tool it's like four or five hundred bucks a month you download it's a Saas tool and you plug in all your financials and it will tell you literally what you suck at what you're great at and where you need to go to be profitable in order to sell and it takes like two to three years and i know it owners don't want to hear that and they don't have to believe me but I m not I m not full of shit I ve been doing this a long time but is that something they can go and do on their own for free or is it going to cost them?

[34:51] So propensity for growth, if you're in your 20s or 30s or 40s and you got another 10, 15, 20 years in you, then you need to find some investment dollars and you need to put those investment dollars toward growth. Now, is it debt? Of course it is, but it's good debt. Like anybody that tells you all debt is bad, you know, like my parents used to tell me they're a bunch of, you know, a bunch of boomers and boomers have wrecked our country, but they're like, they're wrong, right? They didn't teach you about good debt and bad debt. If you read the book, there's a lot of different books you can read about that talk about debt. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a great one. You want to leverage it correctly. And I'm not talking about necessarily about building on debt. What I'm talking about is you need to invest dollars in that growth strategy. So if you're sub $1 million, sell your socks off to get over $1 million.

[35:37] Once you get to that threshold, then yeah, you need to take some investment dollars. If you're older in life, I would question why you're doing that. What's your purpose? What's your pain? Why you want to do that? And if you're younger and you got another 10, 15, 20 years in you, or you're not ready to sell and you got lots of gas in the gas tank, go for it. But you have to invest those dollars strategically. And it should be about 10 to 20% of your overall gross revenue, not your profitability or EBITDA. That's about gross revenue. So if you're $1.5 million, you should at least be spending 150K a year on sales and marketing services with a company like me or, you know, whoever else. Okay.

[36:18] So here's a question that I kind of came up with, and I'm not quite sure, because there's a point where when they get to that stage where they're trying to figure out the next step, it really comes down to what do they have to put into that mindset. And usually we have to ask ourselves some questions, right? Are we ready for this or whatever? um before people start going to spend this money yeah do you have some questions that they need to ask themselves oh yeah to get themselves in the right mind before spending that money yeah i always like to ask the question why are we here and i know it sounds a little bit blunt but like you know the very first question usually i asked her on discovery calls hey Marvin thanks for scheduling a call with me appreciate you your time grateful for this time why are we here what pain points do have. And then we just talk through them, right? And oftentimes, the majority of discovery calls we have, they're not a good fit for us. And I'm looking for one thing. I'm looking for how decisive a decision maker are you?

[37:24] And if you can clearly communicate and extrapolate from your brain through your mouth, where does I want to go? If you're goalless, or if you don't have a goal, if you're rudderless, if you don't have an identity, it's going to take way too much time to get you to the point where you need to be and you can do some other things first. If you're indecisive, if you're argumentative, if you're difficult, if you've got a lot of ego, no way. And we, I mean, I've gotten, not a fight, but I've gotten some arguments on discovery calls where I'm like, got to go click buy and call. And I'm not trying to like poke the bear, but what I am is I'm trying to disrupt.

[38:00] And like our industry, Marvin, and I'm sure you can relate to this, it needs a lot of disruption right now. It needs a lot of disruption from a sales and marketing perspective. There's a lot of crappy, horrible vendors out there, really bad people who are just taking money from really honest guys like you and your family and, you know, a lot of the people who watch this show and that's just not okay. And so we're disrupting it and we're calling out bad behaviors we're calling out people and I ve gotten cease and desist letters but they don't they don't scare me one bit I ve got the world's best attorney in Fargo north Dakota and here in Minneapolis and you know he's a rock star so my point is there has to be a point where what we're looking for is uh ego if you got a lot of ego if you're defensive if you're if you're it's like when you get a call from your best friend and they're struggling with something like say their marriage is falling apart or maybe they gotten themselves in a gambling situation, right? I'm just picking some topics. And they're like, Marvin, I need your help. And you're going to be like, hey, Dave, I totally hear you. What's going on, brother? What's going on? Tell me.

[38:58] Well, I gambled my house away and my wife's leaving me and she's taking the dog and the kids and it's going to turn into a Carrie Underwood song. And you're like, okay, well, if you tried this, what are you doing? What's accountability? Well, I'm doing that. I'm doing that. I don't need your help. I'm doing that. That advice doesn't work. I've tried therapy. I've tried counseling. I've tried peer groups. I've tried Taylor Business Group, HTG, PAX AP. They all tell me the same thing. I'm doing that, but thanks. I'm doing that. And you get off the call and you go talk to your spouse, your better half. And she's like, hey, how'd the call go with Dave? And he's like, I don't know. Dave's a real prick. He's struggling. I love him, but I just want to slap him and choke him because I don't think he gets it. And it was like he wanted my advice, but then he didn't take any of it. And so we're looking for that on the calls we're looking for um you know again that's the just this ego common denominators ego and so if you're a business owner who can work through those things you're going to do great if you're struggling with those things then you got to address those things first before you put any sort of money in your sales and marketing.

[39:59] But let me let me flip that because there's a lot of there's a lot of it business owners that call themselves disruptors yeah and have an ego you know because they've been disruptive and they've gotten to where they are so i mean it sounds like there's a clash of the titans that that are going to happen yeah and i mean how do you deal with that because.

[40:22] I'm not going to say that they're wrong because listen i know some people that are better off than me yeah are that disruptive type that have you know in their eyes and in the rest of the channel's eyes they're a pretty big deal yeah but i see that they're stuck yeah but they don't think they're stuck so how do you how do you get past that yeah lets you can't um there's a difference between ego and confidence. Confidence is like barbecue sauce a little too much and nobody notices a little too much and you ruin your shirt right that's confidence there's nothing wrong without a confidence like i had um Fred Voccolo on the show four three or four months ago and he was awesome and i was warned about him like people are like he can be brash he can be blonde he's a jerk And I'm like, well, I haven't experienced that. I haven't experienced. Matter of fact, he made the former owners of Connect Booster multi-millionaires like 10 times over. So I'd say he's not a bad of a guy. And he grew the company from less than 30 or 40 mil to over a billion dollars in gross annual revenues. And he crushed Arnie Bellini and ConnectWise. So you can say what you want about him. And the podcast was wonderful. He talked about his parents. He lost them both within a 12-month time span. And he talked about regrets and talked about his dad. He was an engineer and developed the toll bridge car system in New York, Jersey or New York or something like that.

[41:52] And it was awesome. And he was just very kind and compassionate. And he was, of course, energetic and direct, which I love that about Fred. Fred's a disruptor. He's a disruptor, right? I wasn't a fan of him when I was at Connect Booster or other channel engagements, but I'm a fan of him now because he's a disruptor. I wasn't a fan of Chris Weiser for a super duper long time. He just rubbed me the wrong way. He just came off as just this cocky prick, but he's not. Chris is a disruptor. And the advice and the wisdom he's given, guys, and he's not sure if you follow his social content. It's on fire. It doesn't matter if it's Claude or ChatGPT or his you know words from his fingertips through his brain to his keyboard like it's good it's blunt and a lot of it guys just they need to hear that right now a lot of them are just really horrible business guys and you know they have to ask the question um you know pressure is more than purpose wearing tight pants like pressure is pressure and if your mindset and attitude isn't in the right place and you don't have a growth mindset you're not willing to find the investment dollars to grow, then you've just got a glorified job with a bunch of W2 employees or contractors running around. And I don't think anybody wants to do that for the next 30 or 40 years. You know what I mean? Yeah, not really.

[43:06] I'm going to take a minute. I'm going to put you on pause real quick. You mentioned Chris Weiser. Yeah. I'm going to shout out Chris Weiser because I am a fan of his. Okay. Well, I follow him on the social media and he can get a little spicy as well. He can, yeah. And I saw Chris a few weeks ago. We shook hands and Chris said he would be on my show, but he hasn't scheduled yet. So, wiser. This is your call out. This is me putting out the call out. I was so wrong about him for so long. Really? Yeah. I mean, you can go to Reddit and some different Facebook groups. And that's like 50-50. 50 hate him and 50 love him. But again, I'm going to like, I'm looking at the facts of what he's talking about. He's saying really good, honest stuff. And so I look forward to him being on your show. Yeah. And he's, you know. See if it happens. He hasn't signed up yet. But we shook hands. He was nice. He was pleasant to me.

[44:03] Yeah. So we'll see. Um, I want to take a break here because usually what happens when I start the Florida man segment, everybody leaves. So I want to get the Florida man stories and then I'm going to come back and finish with you. Um, and I, I've made it a point to do a couple of nice Florida man stories. Yeah. And then of course I got to do one stupid one. So, uh, I mean, I have three links again. Um, by the way, if you're sending me Florida, Florida man stories, thinking they're funny, I'm going to ask you please fact check them please so many of these people are sending me stories that are just made up there are a ton of websites that are made up Florida man stories so um, I fact check my stuff. You fact check your stuff. So a tiny Pomeranian on Merritt Island, which is near where I grew up, needed big league rescue tools after getting its head stuck between the bars of a metal gate. Brevard County fire rescue crews actually broke out the jaws of life to carefully spread the bars and free the dog named Odin. There is a video. I'm not going to play it here, but I will have the link. It has gone viral across social media, so you can watch the full rescue and see why everyone is talking about the Pomeranian named Odin.

[45:26] Let's see. This one is in honor of Don Sizer. A routine Central Florida traffic stop turned into something straight out of Only in Florida. Uh troopers discovered several live iguanas in a vehicle bound with zip ties and packed like contraband we don't know why that was but of course wildlife officials were called in and the photos of the restrained reptiles have people shaking their heads um Florida man so i don't know if this is somebody trying to take your little uh iguana relocation business and make it happen but uh don that happens uh and the last one of course is just plain crazy um deputies say a central Florida man exposed his genitals to a minor while going through a chick filet drive through in palm coast that's up that's northern Florida uh Daytona Jacksonville area uh he was arrested and is facing serious charges, um.

[46:32] Chick-fil-a man that is not the type of restaurant where you expect to see things like that fab and i was thinking Walmart and McDonald s but no chick-fil-a so I ll have the links to all of those in the show notes so there's your Florida man thanks for the Florida man give it up to the Florida man yeah man stories you think people fact check them with the inventive Gemini and clod and ChatGPT you know what i mean you know what's funny there's those sites are making, they're making money oh yeah because of course people can advertise them because people are going to them and believing them and then re-sharing them as clips and stuff yep absolutely, um let's go back uh real quick uh you had started to comment on what Tim had put up uh when you were talking about this stuff and he said uh marketing automation uh you brand your voice get an icp and define who you are and what makes you and then he actually listed a link.

[47:29] To find your voice uh bosa.co yeah you don't even need to use tools like that don't even use those stupid tools use ChatGPT and cloud just get the business version it's like 50 or 60 bucks a month it can do all the same things plus it memorizes it you can create deep research and you can create your own gpt's and yeah ai does all those things for you okay but that's a good tip thing Tim thanks for sharing it so do we want to talk about marketing automation and dive into that sure Sure. Okay. So, because here's the thing. Yeah. A lot of what you said at the beginning about tools that suck are basically automation tools that just go out and they're the Facebook reels, they're the LinkedIn posts and stuff like that. Yeah. Um, I know that I have been guilty of looking at somebody's post and thinking, ah, AI and just scrolling by it. But I know that that's advertising. Yeah. Yeah how do you how do you how do you how do you do it without looking ai ish yeah so that's where to Tim s point you have to understand your tone of voice so if you're going to pay somebody to do it for you like a human being or a contractor 1099 contractor they should be a good copywriter, words are still the most important thing that we use to communicate with each other right and.

[48:47] You know everybody talks about the invent of ai and it's so crazy like the only country in the world that talks about AI more than AI is the United States, right? Like no other, like I've got friends who are in the Philippines and Japan and England and they're like, Dave, nobody's talking about AI over here. I mean, yes, we get excited about the next, you know, Darth Vader looking robot that, um, you know, that Tesla or Elon Musk creates and it's on a, you know, YouTube reel or TikTok reel, but nobody's talking about AI.

[49:13] So it's not, I don't think as far as long as we like to think it is, but what I'll tell you is there's lots of different tools that can help you craft your tone and voice that's the first thing so if you're really humorous if you're really funny if you like a little bit of creativity if you like to curse and you're copywriting that's okay like that's your personality if that's if that's who you are then then be that person because when you're inauthentic people know they could smell a liar a mile away right but if you're really professional and stoic and you know just very kind of uppity that's okay too like if you're really intelligent that's all right your clients are going to expect that when you meet with them on a discovery call and they meet with bozo the clown but your copy makes you sound like um you know bill nye the science guy or uh um who's the really boring guy from the Ferris Bueller um show Bueller Bueller oh the guy that ben stein steal my money yes exactly great awesome so but if you but if you're like ben stein and you show up as bozo the clown or your copy is really funny like bozo the clown you show up as ben stein it's inauthentic and it's going to it's going to break trust immediately with your sales prospect so find your tone and voice, go from there. And then you really have to have the right tools, right? People, process, technology.

[50:23] Again, going back to the book by Vern Harnish, Scaling Up. And if any of your users want a free book, I'll send them a free copy of it. So I'll just, I'll pull my email address, give it to you later.

[50:34] What was that name again? The book is called Scaling Up by Vern Harnish. He's like a crusty old business guy now. And he basically, it's basically a book on how to scale professional services firms. And so if you're not focusing on scaling and sales, then you're dying. Then you're, you know, you, again, you shouldn't, should not own an IT company. But if you are, and you have the right tools, the right people, process, and technology, If those three things are in some sort of shape or alignment, if you take a graph and you put a pie chart and create three different graphs, they almost have to be very perpendicular with each other, very on the same level. If they're not, if you have really high processes and really bad people, then you've got to disconnect. You've got to fix that. If you have a lot, if you have tool overload or AI sprawl, but no one knows how to use them, that's bad. There's a disconnect. Or if you have none at all, if you're not using AI at all, you don't have AI as part of your practice, but you have really high processes, there's a disconnect. You've got to fix that. So they all have to be at a similar level. So you have to have the right tools. You have to have a good, obviously, good ticketing tool, Autotask, ConnectWise, Kaseya. Halo is awesome. Oh, my God. Halo is the best. It's like an awesome tool. And it's cheap, too, in comparison to Kaseya and ConnectWise. Cheap not in usage, just in cost comparison.

[51:47] You have to have a good sales CRM. you have to have a good sales marketing crm so you have to have a place where you can measure your sales funnel and put top of funnel opportunities in your pipeline right so you have to have whether it's HubSpot whether it's um Microsoft dynamics gp uh you know just pick your poison go high level or high level it's not go high level that's their website high level you know there's a lot of them out there that you can utilize and then you have to spend time in them right so it's like relationship a dating relationship or marriage relationship if you never spent time with your spouse, you'd probably have a really bad relationship or not a great relationship. If you spend a lot of time nurturing it, cultivating it, doing the right things, using the right words.

[52:27] Putting into that relationship, pouring into them, and they're pouring into you to win-win for everybody. So you absolutely have to spend time in your sales and marketing CRM. And a lot of the sales and marketing CRMs today, like Microsoft Dynamics, like HubSpot, they have awesome tools to automate everything. So inside of that tool, you can automate and push out content to LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. You can do the same with your email marketing campaign. I mean, so it's all in one tool and you want to try to eliminate tool sprawl as much as you can. The other part is integrations. Like they cost money, but it's just the part of doing business. So if it's not integrated right, we run into this a lot, a lot. And I hate this part of it because I just hate managing data on lists and email marketing lists. You know, we're good at, really good at it, but I hate it. It's like people are always like, oh, well, yeah, we've spent the money on go high level. We're good. We spent the money on HubSpot. We're okay. And then you get in, you're like six weeks later and you're like, this is a fucking mess. Like this is and I m not going to spend the money to do it now i have to go to the CEO with a little bit of egg on my shoulder and go no we didn't uncover this in the assessment you guys should have been more honest with us so it's not about blame and shame but somebody's got to fix this you can either pay us to do it and it's going to cost you money because we're going to charge you for it or you need to go hire somebody else to do it to fix this and so you have to integrate it well inside of your it firm your sales and marketing automation tool along with your other crm tool the psa tool.

[53:52] All right I m going to throw one sidebar question at you and then i want to, do another question to end this on a good note okay there's a lot of the smaller MSPs that, are in it just to do good i just want to i just want to help people i don't want to grow but i need to do marketing just to tread water yeah uh are any of your tactics and i say this not just for those because there's a lot of people that are at maybe they're they want to just stay at five texts yeah um but they need to do marketing does any of your stuff work for those types of scenarios 100 is built for those guys yeah yeah all right so let's do a quick shift and talk about what's coming down the road because even though we know ai is here who knows what that means, but in terms of the, the trends and sales and marketing and.

[54:52] The stuff that we're going to have to do because our industry is going to change i just know that it is but what are some things that you see coming down the road that we need to uh pay attention to I m seeing a lot of the old vendors in the channel go away marketopia is the robin robins is the producers clubs they're shrinking nobody's using them anymore the tech tribes of the world they're shrinking like robin got sold she got absorbed into well yeah yeah exactly yeah French machine so yeah so my point is like now if i were to sign up at robin robins and producers club and i were to um want to get content it's like through some generic Kaseya email address from some 22 year old kid in new York city who you know probably doesn't know how to spell an oxford comma let alone put one in a sentence in the right way right so no offense to 22 year olds who don't know how to use oxford commas but you get my point so a lot of those channel vendors a lot of the marketopias a lot of the tech tribes, like guys and gals are figuring out how to do it on their own. They're leveraging AI. And so the trend now is that as an IT firm, doesn't matter if you're half a million size or five and a half million, you need to start learning AI and you need to start asking it the right questions and teaching it to work for you. And here's a really good analogy. And I saw this, I don't know where I saw it. I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere.

[56:14] But he talked about using AI and approaching it like an empathetic relationship. Like if you've got a friend or family member who's going through something, you don't beat them up for it or chastise them or shake your finger unless you're a complete jerk, but you empathize with them. You're like, oh man, that's really hard, Marvin. I totally hear you. How can I support you? That must be really difficult what you're going through. You need to treat ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all these AI tools who are going to do these works for you and leverage the prompts for you, for you to create content, to create a business plan, to create things, processes, this documentation you need to treat it with empathy and you need to give it context and you.

[56:54] ChatGPT I m sure it's hard to understand my adhd brain here as a CEO of sgs and the visionary and doing all the things ask me 20 questions to learn about my business and be as blunt as you want, and it's going to ask you a bunch of questions and then you tell hey memorize it great memorizes it great now you can link it as a chat right and it's the same in clock it's the same thing so you need to learn how to use it in such a way where you're not using these old school sticky channel vendors who have churn problems up the yin-yang, what you need to do is you need to learn how to leverage AI now to write your process documentation, to get you scalable, to write your email marketing copy, which is totally doable, to create your content calendar that you then input in a really cheap tool for 50 bucks a month and publish it and set it and forget it. So all these little tactics are definitely for the smaller guys and the bigger guys. And that's one big trend I'm seeing on the horizon. The other one is VA's.

[57:54] Get a VA. The busier you get, if you're pushing $100,000 a month in recurring revenue, which is a little over between $1.5 million in gross annual revenue or even half a mil, you're probably really busy fighting fires. You're engineering things. You're over-engineering things. You're overthinking things. You're being an IT guy. You're doing IT stuff. so get a VA to help manage your calendar to help manage a lot of admin tasks like payroll paying your 1099 contractors doing your taxes communicating with your attorney like whatever it is ordering equipment like you can pay a VA to do those things and there's tons of them out there ones we recommend all come from online jobs that's all one word dot ph as in philip Hannah onlinejobs.ph started by a really awesome guy known him Dennis you might know Dennis he's amazing and he's just super smart and it's his it's one of his companies so we've leveraged it i love it so get that person to save you time so you can put more time spending on the business not in the business those are a couple really big trends we're seeing that are really helpful all right what about people who will make the comment ai lies if we asked it a question and.

[59:06] You know 10 different times it'll give us 10 different answers and did i know seven of them will be wrong yeah well my sober day is uh September 19th 2022 so that'll be four years this coming year and i asked it like i don't know a couple months ago hey how many days ago was it was like 200 some days I m like what more than 200 days i was like corrected it I m like you're wrong right and they came back with oh yeah thanks for correcting me right so when you're creating like sales and marketing content, there's not really a whole lot of opportunities for AI to get it wrong.

[59:37] There is a fair bit of editing that you have to do. So if you're creating like a 10 part drip nurture campaign to put into MailChimp or HubSpot or Constant Contact or whatever air.ai to run your calling, cold calling or sales calling or email marketing, like you, you have to fact check it and go through it and read it and do a little bit of editing. Once you go through that a few times you know you'll learn a routine and you'll be just fine but it's when it when it comes to like content creation if you tell ai or ChatGPT or Gemini or clod to create a 10-part drip nurture campaign to drip on a whole bunch of old prospects that are six months old 12 months old whatever and talk about the top 10 problems that CPA firms or law firms have with their outsourced managed it go it will spit out a bunch of ideas you tell it which ones to write it writes them I've not seen an AI tool get it completely wrong or publish anything egregious it might use terms that aren't relevant or say things that aren't relevant or talk about line of business application that are not relevant but overall it's you know you're you should be just fine.

[1:00:44] All right. Just bringing up Tim Golden has a couple of suggestions as well. Yeah. I hear his partnering. Yeah. Get a VA. He's right. Yeah. He's right. Yeah. Way to go, Tim. Proud of you.

[1:00:58] So, Dave, I've received no texts of anybody complaining about being triggered or butt hurt. Good. I'm sure that you might get something. Yeah. I might. i mean look all the vendors i mentioned they're all good people like they have a good solution in one way shape or form i just wouldn't recommend them and they just don't work based on our you know 20 year experience doing this so okay yeah so the opinions expressed in this show are, the guests in theirs my opinion or mine and i say that as a disclaimer because um.

[1:01:38] I will have them on the show yeah exactly uh Dave Scott from Scott growth strategies uh i.

[1:01:46] Put the website up on the show it'll be in the show links there folks um if you guys want to what does it say on your website fix what's broken reignite growth and help you scale with a proven playbook yep emphasis on the fix what's broken almost every it firm we work with is broken it's just a matter of to what extent all right uh well Dave thank you very much sir uh we are over our time so i want to say thank you and uh look forward to doing this again we'll have to do it outside of one of these series and have.

[1:02:20] Some other conversations and love it see how things are doing all right yeah looking forward to it all right folks that is going to do it for this uh episode of the Wednesday live show i will be back next week live and of course if you uh subscribe to the show you will get tons of other uh interviews out as i mentioned the aces conference I ve got a couple of boards of those coming out and i know some of you are behind but these are short listen get a nugget get out and that's going to do it folks we'll be back here again soon we'll see you then and until then holla.